Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
URSULA K. LE GUINFantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN